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I know it must have something to do with fonts but if you look at this question in the iOS app, the diamond ♦ is red.

On every other system the diamond shows up the same color as the rest of the words.

Why is that?

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3 Answers 3

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Update

Fixed! This came up in some other new features we're working on, so we just fixed it. We're doing things client-side on fields which could contain diamonds they may still pop up some places (file a bug report), but questions are fixed all over the place. The secret sauce is some sweet sweet regular expressions:

Pattern:  [\u2666](?=[^\uFE0F\uFE0F]|\z)
Template: $0\uFE0E

Note that I am not removing the Unicode variant if it exists. I am assuming that if you inserted a big red diamond in the editor, you want a big red diamond in your post.

Old answer (aka why is this happening to me?)

So... I looked into this and it appears that iOS is performing a legitimate Unicode 6.1 rendering of that character. Diamond characters U+2666 have two standard variants:

2666 FE0E     ♦ BLACK DIAMOND SUIT text style
2666 FE0F     ♦️ BLACK DIAMOND SUIT emoji style

When you don't specify what variant to use, the renderer gets to pick. WebKit, probably trying to be consistent with the rest of the universe picks FE0E, and UILabel/TextKit/CoreText, trying to be hip with the younger crowd picks FE0F.

When it comes to emoji, I don't know why they picked boring old U+0039 U+FE0E when U+0039 U+FE0F is available. Just my personal opinion.

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9

That's because the diamond character that is used happens to have a corresponding emoji, which is rendered differently from all other glyphs in certain views on iOS. It's the diamond suit character; each other playing card suit has its own emoji as well.

Sent from my iPhone

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  • 1
    Ok. So why is that style not applied to the body like on the android app?
    – qwertynl
    Commented Feb 26, 2014 at 12:17
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    @qwertynl: What do you mean?
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Commented Feb 26, 2014 at 12:19
  • Look at the other answer. The diamond is weird in both the title and the body of the question. In iOS the diamond is only the odd font in the title part.
    – qwertynl
    Commented Feb 26, 2014 at 12:45
  • @qwertynl: I believe that's a web view quirk. Web views don't render emoji for some reason.
    – BoltClock's a Unicorn
    Commented Feb 26, 2014 at 12:49
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It's red in the Android app too. It's even a playing card!

red playing cards!

I think diamonds have been styled to draw attention to them when they could be a fairly small and hard to discern symbol on the phone. I'm not sure if that's the exact reason, though.

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  • i.imgur.com/URFmzJp.png
    – Doorknob
    Commented Feb 26, 2014 at 12:50
  • Oh, huh. Is this a system thing then? (I suppose this is the kind of thing BoltClock's referring to)
    – doppelgreener
    Commented Feb 26, 2014 at 12:52

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